The viral spread of false, misleading, and inaccurate information has increasingly been seen as a threat to democracy globally, leading to dedicated focus from academics, pundits, and policymakers on the topic of mis- and disinformation and the impact of social media platforms on public discourse. In response, there has been a rising wave of organizations, tools, and apps based around fact-checking, media literacy, and the debunking of conspiracy theories. However, not only do technological and social efforts often fail to correct the deep-seated mechanisms of disinformation, polarization, and extremist belief, they seem in some cases to reaffirm and calcify the divisions they aim to erase.
Central to the study of mis- and disinformation are questions of how and under what circumstances—social, cultural, historical, and technical—information is deemed “truthful,” “factual,” or “authentic.” Focusing on these deeper questions recognizes “fake news” as a symptom, not the underlying cause of information disorder. What leads people to believe certain facts or, even knowing the facts to be misrepresented, believe in the institution or individual sharing them?
Born from a Media & Democracy workshop, this essay collection emphasizes that authenticity is always relational: It is determined by someone, about someone. Shifting beyond issues of objective fact, it looks instead at questions of authority, performance, and mechanism: Who decides what is authentic? Who is allowed to be authentic? Who is believable, and how do questions of believability intersect with questions of race, gender, and class? How is authenticity different online vs. offline? Who benefits from authentication? Who shoulders the burden of proof? This essay series explores how a stronger understanding of authenticity and realigning our focus beyond disinformation might lead to more robust interventions in an increasingly fractured and polarized political landscape.
This series has been curated by Jason Rhody, program codirector of Media & Democracy; Mike Miller, program codirector of Media & Democracy and program codirector of Just Tech; and Penelope Weber, projects coordinator for Media & Democracy and Digital Culture programs.
What does tracking the provenance of news stories tell us about authenticity and authentication in international news reporting? In this essay, Alejandro Paz explores sourcing and citational practices and imagines more robust methods for tracing the circulation of news.
Drawing on interviews with professional social media marketers, Johan Lindquist and Esther Weltevrede break down how the algorithmic infrastructure of platforms such as Instagram shape public understandings of "authentic" politicians, influencers, and businesses.
In examining the current landscape of anti-disinformation research, Maite Taboada argues that social media companies sharing larger data samples with researchers could help efforts to distinguish between true and false information through language and text analysis.
Despite calls from both ends of the political spectrum to regulate social media platforms, new federal action has been slow to materialize. However, Steph Hill outlines how social, political, and advertising pressures may be creating a new system of regulation stemming not from governmental sources but from fellow corporate actors.
To help contextualize current efforts to identify and combat online misinformation, Rebecca Emigh gives a history of authentication methods for oral, visual, and literary news through multiple eras of Western history.
Despite popular perceptions that trust in news media is on the decline, trust may actually be ascendant. However, Rachel Moran argues, to understand trust in media today, one has to understand its relational nature. Relational trust is tied to hyper-individualized assessments of the authenticity of the journalist that give leverage to micro-celebrities and pseudo journalists on social media.
Melody Devries and Noel Brett explore the ways in which human readers, like online systems, "authenticate" information they receive, checking it for trustworthiness and perceived truth, and how this interacts with notions of identity, homophily, and otherness.
Drawing on feminist scholarship and social media studies, Nelanthi Hewa discusses the fraught role authenticity plays in cases of sexual assault, where survivors are expected to perform transparency to massive public audiences in order to be believed.
In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as pundits, politicians, and citizens all pored over data dashboards detailing infection rates and deaths, Heidi Tworek asked: What is the historical rationale for how statistics came to become the authentic mode to represent disease? Bringing historical insight to a contemporary problem of science communication, Tworek explores the power and limit of statistics to drive public health interventions.
In the opening essay for the “Beyond Disinformation” series, Wendy HK Chun asks whether authenticity may provide a more useful lens for investigating contemporary social problems that are often treated uniformly as problems of mis- and disinformation.
